"If cognition is the instrument for getting hold of absolute being, it is obvious that the use of an instrument on a thing certainly does not let it be what it is for itself, but rather sets out to reshape and alter it. If, on the other hand, cognition is not an instrument of our activity but a more or less passive medium through which the light of truth reaches us, then again we do not receive the truth as it is itself, but only as it exists through and in this medium. Either way we employ a means which immediately brings out the opposite of it's own end; or rather, what is really absurd is that we should make use of a means at all
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Yes, I think Hegel is influenced here by the reception of Kant by Jacobi and Fichte wherein transcendental philosophy is corrected by reasserting intellectual intuition as the primary contact of the subject with being. But unlike Jacobi and much more than Fichte, Hegel is going to make this intuition (paradoxically?) something intrinsically mediated. Being is given to us in intuition, but just as given, rather than absolutely. Hegel is I think trying to defend a middle ground, as it were, where being is both intuitively given and yet mediated, and does so by making the mediation the very nature of its givenness. So we must proceed on this basis, as Hegel does, by following the nature of what is given to us, which in this curious way only becomes what it is at the conclusion of science (if it is anything at all, which of course Hegel will argue it is
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I haven't read enough German Idealism to say, but in my gut it seemed he was, in this paragraph, going after it and Empiricism while at the same time saying, "Well, there's no need for this tabula rasa stuff, but I'm going to take the other to its logical conclusion." Still, I don't want to confine it to German Idealism. His approach seems rather Platonic and even Neoplatonic in its unfolding and how the book progresses from sense to Spirit, though the Concept doesn't exist in an Eternal Form; rather, it exists in a universal here and now.
Being in Kant is still--I think he would never admit this, BTW--the merely potential, the irrational, to which the creative spirit must be added for it to be actual.
I won't tell on him if you don't! :)
For realz, though, it seems the conclusion of the noumena, and what Hegel drives at later in Consciousness, is that the Concept essentially changes through our apprehension of it. The Concept requires us to truly be. This primary condition of being and the requirement of becoming you allude
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"The Concept requires us to truly be. This primary condition of being and the requirement of becoming you allude to in the last sentence seems righto."But it's important I think to keep these two points entirely together, as you have here. For reason is present in itself as being, essence, and concept, it is present in mathematics, physics, and biology, and only then, in a sense, present in psychology, society, and ultimately in philosophy, religion, and art. The concept requires us to be not in the sense of us being given as its starting point and it as being strictly ideal, but rather in this curious sense that the concept finds its end in us, and its accomplishment of the end is in this funny way just what it is itself. We supply the condition of the possibility of the concept only, as it were, toward the end of its becoming what it is. (And in particular by recognizing it as it is, this recognition being in the nature of the concept
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Being in Kant is still--I think he would never admit this, BTW--the merely potential, the irrational, to which the creative spirit must be added for it to be actual.
I won't tell on him if you don't! :)
For realz, though, it seems the conclusion of the noumena, and what Hegel drives at later in Consciousness, is that the Concept essentially changes through our apprehension of it. The Concept requires us to truly be. This primary condition of being and the requirement of becoming you allude ( ... )
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